Migrating from wordpress to django without losing pagerank - django

I have got a blog in wordpress (www.ashwinm.com) which i am looking to migrate to django as i am very much impressed with it. Is there any way so that i can migrate to django without losing my current pagerank (which is 3)?
I don't mind losing all current contents of this blog as it is too old.

You could take a look at something like django-wordpress. That would allow you to keep your current content in the existing wordpress DB (read-only) and continue to develop other portions of the site with Django.

If you have a high pagerank, that is probably because you have content and the content is linked to by other people. You should try to keep that content in some form (it doesn't have to be exactly the same form), or at least ensure that every URL that is being linked to redirects to something useful. No one who follows a previously valid link to your website should get a 404.
Your content and your inbound links together are responsible for your pagerank, so if you let both die then you're back at square one, regardless of what web application framework you are using.
If I were doing it I would probably set up the new blog with Django and import the data manually. Or, if there is simply way too much data, I could move the Wordpress server to be served from a directory such as /archive and instruct my webserver to 301 redirect all of the old Wordpress blog entry URLs to the new directory. You would have to continue to maintain the Wordpress installation to some degree, but you would be 100% certain to keep all of your pagerank.

Related

Editing a previously generated HTML file with Django

I am very new to web development and the following is my use-case :
I have a large number of Bokeh charts, each in a separate HTML file.
In simple terms, I would like to have a home page, where I can provide
links to each one of these charts. However, During runtime, I would
like to edit these separate HTML files, so as to provide a link to go
back to the home page or to other pages. I would not like to modify
the HTML files permanently, so I can make use of them outside of the
web page as well for simple visualization on my system.
What is the best way to do this ? Are there technologies outside Django, I should be looking at to do something like this ?
If most of the content is static, maybe have a look at Jekyll.
The include functionality would let you create one file with the 'link back to the homepage' or in fact further content which you want to avoid repeating (such as navbars, headers, footers).
Bootstrap 4 is your freind for making the site look shiney.
As you're building the site you can run the development server with jekyll serve which allows you to connect to a development server from your browser, and preview changes as you're making them. This would be accessible somewhere like http://localhost:4000/
When you're ready to publish, you can use the jekyll build command, which outputs all of the static HTML files to the _site directory. Notice that at this point, the step of 'putting the homepage link in every page' is handled automatically by Jekyll and you end up with a directory you can upload directly to any hosting platform. The original HTML files/Boken Charts can therefor remain in their original form for use elsewhere.
This method is probably much more effiient than using Django for your use-case, which seems to require serving lots of static content whch already exists. With Django in production you'd need an application server, as well as a webserver and possibly a database which means more things to go wrong.
For bonus points, once you've got the hosting setup, stick the whole thing behind CloudFlare to reduce your hosting costs, and improve access speeds for visitors around the world!
Good luck.
EDIT: response to comment:*
Do you mean that I should abandon django altogether ?
If the purpose is just to serve your exising HTML files to the public, without any requirement for authentication, editing of content by users through the frontend, or more advanced back-end functions, then yes Django is probably overkill for this task.
How is Jekyll different from Django ?
Django is a Python Web Framework, which allows you to build an interactive site on which users or staff can login, post articles, comment, etc. One of its key features is the ability to define database relationships trough 'Models' and then have all the admin-side forms generated automatically in the background. This means, with minimal work, you can instantly have the 'admin portal' side of the site live, which works great for use-cases like large blogs or news sites. You would then build the frontend, which can also be interactive. To launch this into production is a separate task which involves configuring multiple server components.
Jeykll on the other hand is much simpler, and basically gives you a way to create some template HTML files (avoiding the need to repeat code for stuff like navigation bars) and then with the jekyll build command outputs a _site directory which can be uploaded straight to a basic webserver. This is the crucial part, as you then only need a webserver which can serve static content, rather than requiring python, a database, application server like UWSGI, etc
Let's look at this example from the Jeyll Docs with your usecase in mind.
You could define a YML file with a list of all your charts:
docs_list_title: All Charts here.
docs:
- title: A Lovely Bokeh Chart.
url: bokeh_chart_1.html
- title: This Bokeh Chart is even Better
url: bokeh_chart_2.html
You mentioned previously that you already have the HTML files, so really what you've done here is made a list of those, which can be interpreted by the frontend.
The HTML template portion would look something like this:
<h2>{{ site.data.samplelist.docs_list_title }}</h2>
<ul>
{% for item in site.data.samplelist.docs %}
<li>{{ item.title }}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
This would result in a list of links to all of your Charts, with the link text as the title.
Obviously you could then go further and add further info to the YML file, like beneath each url put publisher: someone which could then be accessed in the template's for loop as {{item.publisher}}
Can such tools like Jekyll, Django and Bootstrap be used together ?
Bootstrap can be used with Django or Jekyll, as it is a CSS library which controls how HTML is rendered in the user's browser. Check the documentation for more examples of its capability.
A good starting point may be to download a theme from somewhere like Start Bootstrap. Once you have that as a ZIP file, you can put it in your Jeykll project and attempt to have it render through the dev server with jekyll serve. You can then remove nav bar or header code to separate include files (see my earlier link to the Jeykll docs) and before you know it you'll be seeing progress.
The best way to learn is to just go ahead and try this!

Decoupled CMS, Selective crawling of the db server

We are running a decoupled CMS (using Wordpress as our db) and want to prevent search engines from crawling our posts from this server. We have post templates on that server so writers can preview their posts and Google has found them.
Am I able to detect a that a crawler is trying to access these pages in my .htaccess file and redirect to the www server? Is redirecting the wrong solution here? Can robots.txt block a generic pattern such as category/post-title?
Three things need to still happen:
We need to still be able to access db.site.com/wp-admin
Writers still need to preview their posts, which means they cannot be redirected.
db.site.com/wp-content/uploads needs to be accessible so Social sites can pull
images.
Here are how the posts are setup. Basically I want to block or redirect posts from db.site.com
db.site.com/category/post-title
www.site.com/category/post-title

Wordpress database integration/sync with Django

My company will be rolling out a new website to accompany our product launch and would like to switch over to Wordpress as our content management system. We will be utilizing a Wordpress theme that will allow users to create their own virtual events without having to log into the Wordpress dashboard (back-end). This event information will be displayed on the website for other users to view and register - this is all built into the theme we have purchased.
These virtual events will be held on our software platform, which is built on Django. We would like to utilize Wordpress to manage the login and event creation process, but would also like to have event information displayed on the Wordpress site AND imported to the Django database as well.
For example: Users will need to submit three items on the front-end Wordpress site to create an event: Title, Host Name, and Start Time. When that information is submitted can it be automatically duplicated to the Django database in addition to it being sent to the WP database?
I have already done some research on this matter, but what I have found thus far might not work for our needs. I found this presentation by Collin Anderson - it is similar to what we want to achieve, but I believe the application is a little different: http://www.confreaks.com/videos/4493-DjangoCon2014-integrating-django-and-wordpress-can-be-simple.
I have a lot of experience with Wordpress, but very limited experience with Django. This question is more for research purposes than a "how-to". We want to know if we can continue to plan on heading toward the Wordpress direction or if we should seek alternative methods for our site. I appreciate you taking moment to answer my question.
I'm working on something similar at the moment and found a good starting point was this:
http://agiliq.com/blog/2010/01/wordpress-and-django-best-buddies/
That way, as dan-klasson suggests, you can use the same database for both the wp side and the django side.
In short, first things first take a back up of the wp database in case anything goes wrong.
Create a new django project and set your settings.py to use the wp database.
In this new django project you can use ./manage.py inspectdb > models.py to autogenerate a models.py file of the wp database. Be careful here as there are differences between wp and django conventions. You will need to manually alter some of the auto generated models.py. Django supplies db_table and db_column arguments to allow you to rename tables and columns for the django part if you'd like to.
You can then create a new django app in your django project and place the models.py you've created in there. This new app will be using the same data as your wordpress site. I'm not sure exactly what you want to do but I would be very, very careful about having wordpress and django access the same data simultaneously. You may want to set the django side as read only.
You can then add other apps to extend the django side of things as you wish.
I should point out that I haven't completed my work on this yet but so far so good. I'll update as I find sticking points etc.

Django URL conf and Backbone.js Router

I have a backbone.js single-page app that is all set up with the router (well, actually a Backbone.Marionette app with a Backbone.Marionette AppRouter, but nevertheless). However, the backend is based in Django, where I do not have the URL conf directing to views for all URLs that are already in the backbone.js routes.
Based on the existing URLs in the Django URL conf, Backbone.js will serve the backbone routes regardless of what is listed in the Django conf - it seems something, anything just needs to be there.
Do I need to have proper Django views in order to offer a fallback for older browsers/SEO?
What are the best practices to coordinate the Django URL conf and the Backbone.js Router?
I've found a post that addresses this issue quite well:
http://duganchen.ca/single-page-web-app-architecture-done-right/
Briefly, my reasoning for including a fallback is for non-javascript browsers and SEO reasons. At the time of this post, non-javascript browsers account for ~1.4% (less than 2% from everything I've read) of users, making SEO The major consideration. Again, SEO may not be relevant for everyone reading this post, in which case, this can be skipped.
I found Thomas Davis' tutorial using phantom.js quite helpful. http://backbonetutorials.com/seo-for-single-page-apps/
However, another issue that I needed to account for was the history API, which has been neglected by all but the latest IE browsers. Given my client's users, about 15% of which are using IE <= 9, this was also a problem.
In the end, I also needed to use history.js. All in all, this was a lot of work to update an otherwise very simple website. However, I learned a lot from this ordeal.
In my opinion if your backbone app is truly a single page then you don't need any django views whatsoever. You can serve your index.html as a static file (in production, not even by django) and then let backbone's router take care of your url configuration, as you're doing already. You can use backbone's history and navigate to fake urls, add urls parameters etc, for resources in your app.

Iframe working correctly on localserver but not production server

A question like this was asked before and the person got nothing but criticisms, hope this won't be the case here.
I have a website that allows a business to add their menu to my site, and some have requested to be able to import a menu (a pdf or jpg) that is already online elsewhere. So I made a form that saves a url to the db and then that url is used in the src of an iframe on my site.
I tested it all and it worked fine on my local machine (using Django development server). When I synced it over to my production server and saved the same url I was testing with, the iframe loads no content.
I imagine that it has something to do with trying to read an individual file from another server because it works if I make the url google.com or to an image that is under my domain name. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Storing a url instead of a pdf in my db is much more efficient so doing this way is preferred over uploading their menu to my site.
I don't think this question needs any code attached, but if you want to see some let me hear it.
Thanks
The menu you're testing with probably has the X-Frame-Options response header set.
Is there a reason you're putting the image/pdf as the src on an iframe instead of just using the img tag (or putting an img tag inside your iframe)? There's still no guarantee that will work for all pages, as some sites will refuse to serve media to an external page, but I suspect this is your problem in this case.